


You're So Lost, Even I Can't Bring You Home

by th_esaurus



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Amnesia, Consent Issues, Domestic, M/M, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:56:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3701369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The boy leans in to kiss him. Close-mouthed, quite dry, a gesture more than anything.</p><p>"'S that okay?" he asks, one hand on the back of Harry's chair and one hand on the dining table. Pinning him. "It's all right, yeah?"</p><p>"Whatever you're used to," Harry murmurs, "is perfectly fine by me."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will end badly. I'm warning you now.
> 
> This fic owes everything to Destronomics.

**i.**

 

There is something quite pleasant about the boredom of middle-aged routine, Harry tells himself.

 

Cashmere cardigans and inoffensive shirts in the wardrobe. Broadsheet on the dining room table every morning; slippers under the far chair. Two choices of tea, English Breakfast or Earl Grey. Toast, granola, an orange sliced in half lengthways. Harry Hart starts his day at a liberally lazy 8.30am, and takes everything afterwards at a leisurely pace. As though he's catching up on rest from years and years of insomnia.

 

Harry sleeps rather well of an evening, actually.

 

After the initial depression – a dreadful sort of inertia that left him frustrated and quick to anger – his doctor put him on some sort of enforced positive thinking course. Finding the small upswings in each day rather than focusing on the overwhelming negative that he cannot remember who he is.

 

So. Sleeping well is a nice positive.

 

Eggsy trots home for brunch most days. Another plus. Bounces up on his toes to kiss Harry hello on the cheek. He's always out too early in the mornings for breakfast, so stuffs an apricot Danish in his mouth and talks anyway, standing while he eats, crumbs on his crisp lapel and his eyes bright behind his glasses. Harry licks his thumb and picks up flecks of pastry from his suit jacket. Check-in over, it's time for a goodbye kiss. Pleased and curt.

 

"Seeya, Harry," he always says.

 

"See you, Eggsy," Harry always replies.

 

He had introduced himself as _Eggsy_. The revelation of his birth name – Gary Unwin – came as an afterthought several days after Harry got out of the hospital, which was itself several weeks after he woke up. He thought the name idiotic; a three year-old child can be called Eggsy. Not a tailor's apprentice.

 

But the boy had clearly shrugged off an old skin with the old name.

 

So. "See you, Eggsy," is what Harry always replies. It's easy enough to remember to do that.

 

*

 

Eggsy is a terrible cook, and Harry has poor depth perception and can't always get the bloody spatula into the bloody frying pan first time round, so they order a lot of take-away in the early days. Harry finds new memories easy enough to form, and recalls quite clearly that they were eating fish and over-salted chips when Eggsy tells him the story of his accident.

 

A car-crash, of course.

 

"In summertime?" Harry asks. His eyebrow pulls up the chunk of scar tissue over his right socket whenever he raises it; surprise and incredulity are tricky emotions nowadays. "I can't even blame icy roads? How disappointing."

 

"Not your fault," Eggsy says, firm and short, like he's practiced saying it a good many times in front of the mirror.

 

A car crash in summertime. Harry taking what Eggsy indelicately calls his mid-life crisis car for a runaround outside the M25, where the fields start rolling and the London skyline fades into the distance. Open top. He was wearing a cravat.

 

"Very pretentious," Harry scoffs.

 

"You looked dapper as fuck," Eggsy says. He has a lovely grin. Harry has thought that from the beginning. He didn't know the boy when he woke, but he knew objectively he had a nice, toothy, straight smile. There had been tears on his lips at the time. Still—

 

Perhaps the damn thing flew up in his face. Perhaps a fucking crisp packet blew across his line of sight. Perhaps he was just a foolish old man. If Eggsy doesn't know, Harry never will.

 

A low hanging branch burst straight through his right eye when he hit the tree, exploding it on impact. The force of it left something akin to a bullet hole through Harry's skull, in the front and cleanly out the back. They had to cut the branch off with trauma shears and get him to hospital lying on his side, with the tree's parting gift skewering through him.

 

"Did you have to see it?" Harry asks. Pokes at his chips with a fork. Perhaps he could wash some of the salt off with a dash of vinegar. He has inappropriate thoughts sometimes. Out of context; a side-effect.

 

"Yeah," Eggsy says quietly.

 

"I'm sorry for that."

 

Eggsy shrugs a little. He dresses very well for a young man, but has rough mannerisms. The tonal jar of his existence makes Harry want to kiss him, and that too is inappropriate. The majority of the time.

 

"I wanted to be there when you got up," Eggsy says. As though Harry had been asleep for hours, rather than unconscious for months.

 

Indeed, he had discovered Eggsy sitting at his bedside, clutching his hand between both warm palms. There were other people in the room – doctors, Harry supposes – but by the time he was fully alert, lights shone in his single eye and blood pressure taken and depressors stuck childishly into his mouth, say ahh, all that nonsense; after all that, it was just him and Eggsy. The boy clinging onto his hand. Somewhat crying and somewhat trying to hide it.

 

Within the week, Harry had established that Eggsy was not his son. ("You're havin' a fuckin' laugh," he'd spat, through that wonderful, bright grin.)

 

No further solid information was offered, and when the boy was allowed to take him home, he knew where Harry's robe and slippers were, ran Harry a warm bath, took a bottle of Guiness out of the cupboard – never the fridge, he said, as though mocking Harry – and apologised that it wasn't a freshly pulled pint. A slightly fat pug yapped around their feet, well-trained but eager to see Eggsy. Why did Eggsy's dog reside in Harry's townhouse?

 

Harry made assumptions. A man with no foundations can only do such things.

 

They slept in the same bed that night. Most nights since. Eating their fish and chips. Eating their tikka masala. Eating their chow mein and egg fried rice. And then going to bed together.

 

(Eggsy wears underwear in bed, and doesn't wrap himself around Harry's body. Just Harry's hand on the boy's taut stomach, his breathing always a little stressed until he's fully asleep.

 

Harry feels old and fragile for it, and can't blame him.

 

It must be hard to hold a man risen from the dead.)

 

*

 

There are missteps, inevitably.

 

Harry likes to pity himself that he's older than he is, argue that he's senile despite the clarity of his present mind, despite the delineation on his chest that suggest he's one of those obnoxious middle-aged joggers. Ellipticals and rowing machines. God forbid.

 

"Nah," Eggsy says, poking him in the ribs and stealing two bites of his toast, "You're all soft 'round the middle now."

 

"Hospital beds will do that to the figure," Harry says coolly. It's a terrible thing to say, and he hasn't worked out yet if he's the sort of man who apologises.

 

Eggsy shrugs gamely. "Come out, then? Tear up the roads with me."

 

"I hardly think so," Harry mutters. He feels flabby and unsuitable. What would they look like? A boy running backwards to keep pace with his father.

 

He feels spectacularly unpaternal towards Eggsy.

 

None of the great literary romances teach you how to fall for somebody you're already supposed to love. It's a singularly strange experience.

 

"Other ways of keeping fit," Eggsy says, leering for a split-second. He seems embarrassed by the insinuation almost immediately. Perhaps the doctors had said to him, no taxing physical exertion, with a pointed gaze and a stern tone.

 

Harry finishes his toast, and the boy leans in to kiss him. Close-mouthed, quite dry, a gesture more than anything.

 

"'S that okay?" he asks, one hand on the back of Harry's chair and one hand on the dining table. Pinning him. "It's all right, yeah?"

 

"Whatever you're used to," Harry murmurs, "is perfectly fine by me."

 

The vagueness of the answer seems to unsettle them both. Eggsy doesn't lean back in. Combs his fingers through his neat hair, and makes a move to return to work. Some lenient boss he must have, these regular flights back home to the old man.

 

The thing is, Harry would like very much to kiss him. The boy is a charmer. He talks at length every night, the ways of his world, his feet tangled up in Harry's on the middle cushion of the sofa. He wears his polo shirts with the collars up-turned on the weekend, and khakis that he pulls at too often, as though he's used to looser jeans. They look good on him. He looks—consistently good. A bright young thing.

 

Harry very desperately wants to know him. Not to learn him anew, but to know, instinctively, everything he should already know. How they met, when feelings became mutual, how many times Eggsy called him an old fart before he climbed graciously into Harry's bed. The negatives, too, those little flesh wounds his doctor tells him to stop picking at: where do Eggsy's parents stand on the matter? His notably-absent friends? He discusses at length, often with an open mouth full of food, his circle of friends, and it only seems to consist of a lone girl called Roxanne and minor characters that Eggsy has never bothered to name.

 

"Me Dad's dead and me Mam don't care," Eggsy says tetchily, when Harry tries to ask.

 

"Doesn't care or doesn't know?"

 

"Whatever."

 

Harry, with a hesitance that doesn’t befit a man of his age, threads his fingers through Eggsy's. "I'm sorry about your father."

 

It was a long time ago. And how did he die?

 

"Same way as you," Eggsy murmurs bitterly.

 

Missteps and stutters.

 

Harry comes into the bathroom one Sunday morning when Eggsy is shaving. His bare feet quiet on the misty tiles. The boy's muscles move like water as he raises and lowers his arm. The sharp cut of his jawline. He could be a boxer, Harry thinks abruptly. Could take on the world with his frown and his grin and his coiled knuckles.

 

Eggsy's washing his razor under the running tap when Harry comes up behind him, close, and puts his palms on Eggsy's shoulders and his mouth against the nape of the boy's neck.

 

He flinches visibly, swears, the razor clattering around the sink. "Fuck, Harry. Didn't hear you come in--"

 

"No, no—" Harry's hands are already up, clear of his bare skin once more, both placating and defensive. "It's my fault entirely. I should've—"

 

"It's your house," Eggsy says, hard and loud, meeting Harry's eyes in the bathroom mirror. He looks indistinct in the steam, glowing and young. "I'm your—I'm, you know."

 

"Apparently I do," Harry murmurs. He lowers his hands cautiously this time, signaling his movements. Slides his palms down the curves of Eggsy's shoulders while he grips the edge of the sink. Kisses the knot at the top of the boy's spine, twice, and then no more.

 

"You taught me how to shave with a straight razor once," Eggsy mutters, perhaps to himself. "Only I couldn't do it on me own. Needed you to do it for me."

 

He turns defiantly, and sort of anger in his eyes that Harry can't begin to unravel. Lost time? Lost opportunities? He doesn't get the chance to study the boy before they're kissing, mouth to mouth. Eggsy pulls at his lips and tongue, opened up and greedy, only taking the lead until Harry takes over. Steadies the pace. Not a race, just an exploration. The boy makes a small noise as Harry takes his time with Eggsy's tongue, wet and thick; a disgruntled little noise.

 

"I'm sorry if I'm—slow," Harry murmurs. He wants to draw the boy into him, to wrap him up and reassure him; but they stand with their foreheads pressed and their hands by their sides.

 

"Shut up," Eggsy says, and Harry figures that no, no, he never was the apologising sort.

 

He leaves the boy to his ablutions, standing just outside the bathroom door. Listens to him cleaning his teeth. The full three minutes.

 

*

 

Late spring, and Eggsy announces he's taking two abrupt days off from work. Picks out a crisp white shirt and a navy jumper for Harry to wear, hands him a signet ring from Harry's apparent personal collection, and tells him idly he looks scorching. He drives them both out to St. James's Park. A bag full of Waitrose ready-to-eat, sandwiches and beer, batenberg, bloody little scotch eggs and all.

 

Eggsy wears sunglasses and an unbecoming cap, and chews gum with his mouth not always closed. He has a swagger about him, like he's showing Harry off, proving to the world that Harry Hart is very much alive. He feels a little banged up, a dented antique with a glass right eye and a patchwork of scars shading his skin like a poor artist would. Getting the light all wrong. Still, he can walk tall. Not a jot of damage to the rest of him. Despite the violence of the crash.

 

"I'm gonna boat you up and down the lake like a bloody gentleman," Eggsy says, and hires them a swan-shaped pedallo. The mallards and drakes ruffle their wings, disgruntled, as Eggsy tries to bowl across the water, leaning out the side like a boy racer in a knock-off Lamborghini. He gives two fingers to every duck that crosses their path, and the boatman shouts at him from the shoreline.

 

"This is fucking absurd," Harry says, utterly tickled. The boy is brash and tart-mouthed in public, and Harry finds himself soft and fond. A sort of youth that he never imagines he had, Eggsy's side of the tracks well apart from his - presumably - sheltered private school-life and Oxbridge upbringing.

 

What did he study? Law? Politics? Something far too dry for this vivid boy, he's sure.

 

"You wanna kiss me?" Eggsy asks, as they float aimlessly in the middle of the lake. He's grinning but his shades hide his eyes.

 

"I do," Harry murmurs, already leaning forward. Anyone can see them out here. So he settles for holding Eggsy's hand instead, an archaic gesture that pleases the boy nonetheless. Harry would rather be quaint than forward. He doesn't know how they used to be. Legs around each other thrusting against the kitchen worktop, he wonders. Bare arse-prints on the fucking marble. He wonders.

 

Eggsy squeezes his hand. Kisses his knuckles and looks amused by himself.

 

It barely feels like London at all in this slice of green-belt countryside. The sky as clear as Harry's polished memory. Shined too well around the edges; all the detail scrubbed away.

 

Eggsy's phone rings in his pocket. Harry half listens to his muttered conversation - _nah,_ he says, _showing the old man a good time. You fuckin' well know who. Can't Rox--yeah. Yeah. Yes. I got it._

 

"I gotta go back to the shop," he says, quietly angry.

 

"The Westminster elite wait for no man," Harry muses. The boy seems all of a sudden strained, a different creature to five minutes back, slipping into his role. Delicate and dedicated. A serious young man of mild ambition.

 

Who taught him to button up like that, Harry wonders. He'll likely revisit the question.

 

So now what? Back home, back to routine. Eggsy changes fast and takes the car. Harry feeds the dog, reads the news a little. Idly searches for Eggsy's tailors shop online. Harry had tried, when they first got out of the hospital, to pay for everything - the taxi home, something to fill up the fridge - and Eggsy had snorted, said, hold the fuckin' phone, I got ways and means, Harry Hart.

 

Harry hadn't known for a day or two whether Eggsy's means were above board. He made too many assumptions these days, and let out a breath or two when the boy trotted downstairs and showed off his suit, handed Harry a gold-rimmed business card that read, _Kingsman, Est. 1849_. Savile Row, by appointment only, the website says. No prices listed.

 

He does wonder how the boy ever got an interview there, let alone a job, and then hates himself for his own snobbery for a little while.

 

Eggsy, as if to punish him for it, doesn't come home that night. He has Harry's phone number, set up the phone himself (his doctor and several takeaways are the only other numbers at present). But no message either.

 

Harry eats the leftover scotch eggs for dinner. Takes a long bath. Pokes around in Eggsy's half of the wardrobe. His clothes are all prim but he has some godawful shoes hiding at the back. Scuff marked trailers with stripes and wings. There's a curio inside one of them, a pink and gold chain, not cheap-looking but stuffed inside the shoe as though Eggsy had rushed to hide it and then forgotten. A solid circle with a twee design in gold across the middle, two braided lines bisecting a central third. Something naval, perhaps. Eggsy had, he'd admitted, trained in the marines for a time. Perhaps he had some seafaring blood in him too.

 

Perhaps his father.

 

Harry curls the chain around its pendant and puts it back in the shoe and goes to bed, chiding himself that he should mind his own fucking business. Delve into his own secrets before he seeks out the boy's.

 

An empty day, after he wakes. The dog stands guard at the front door. Harry eats too many pastries at brunch because Eggsy isn't there to scoff the rest. It's pathetic, he thinks, how much his day revolves around the boy. No other friends, it seems. Nobody who mourned his brief loss of life, nobody to celebrate his return. Fifty-something and only a toyboy boyfriend for company.

 

The word sticks in his mind and makes him coy. He likes Eggsy ever so much. He's supposed to, he knows, but the reality of falling in love is--complex. He's trying to piece his life together. Matters of the heart feel so fucking teenage.

 

He thinks about--he thinks about masturbating in the shower while Eggsy's out.

 

"Ridiculous," Harry mutters.

 

He goes to bed.

 

The boy comes back just after two in the morning. Harry's woken by the sounds of running water, the slick of soap on wet hands. He turns over to the middle of the bed, but keeps his eyes closed. Wonders if Eggsy, too, is the apologising sort.

 

The quiet shift of clothes. He climbs in under the duvet, into the cavern Harry's curled body creates. Naked, wholly, for the first time in Harry's presence, he presses their chests together. Warm and pulsing, Eggsy's skin hums and tingles with adrenaline. Harry could ask him where he's been, why he left, why he sent no word. "Got held up at work," Eggsy murmurs, shaking.

 

Or Harry could believe what he's told, and hold the boy.

 

So he does. Arms wrapped wholly around Eggsy's lit body, their cocks just pressing, kissing and kissing and kissing.

 

It's impossible to recall old memories and ever so easy to create new ones, and Harry will remember this. His whole damn life. He will remember this.


	2. Chapter 2

**ii.**

 

The day is stunning. The sky daubed with hazy clouds, a spectre of rain in the far distance but nothing impending. The flowers are coming out in Harry's garden, the mews tightly packed together but seemingly impenetrable, high brick walls and fences of sunflowers and vine. Eggsy brings out two glasses packed with ice and more bottles of beer than two people can reasonably drink of a Sunday afternoon.

 

Harry hooks his foot around Eggsy's deckchair and drags it closer just before the boy sits down.

 

He has no confidence in the stability of his life, his past and his memories, but damn it, he's confident enough to woo the boy in the comfort of his own home.

 

"This gardener kept coming," Eggsy murmurs, his knee sliding against Harry's as he sits, pops open a beer. Doesn't bother with a glass, drinks straight from the bottle. "While you was out of it. Every other week, all regular. I watched him spend like two hours prunin' the bushes and didn't have the heart to tell him you weren't gonna pay up any time soon."

 

"You've been a terrible executor of my affairs," Harry says mildly.

 

Eggsy grins up at the sky. "Ain't gotta worry about that anymore, have I."

 

Harry thinks about—

 

He thinks about sucking Eggsy off, there in the garden. The beer bottles perspiring by their feet. Not out of any particular want to be lewd, or even lust; the thing Harry wants most of all for himself and the boy is normalcy, after everything. To be however they were.

 

He feels a little silly, getting to his knees, the slate cool against the palms of his hands. Eggsy looks at him and clicks his tongue, amuses himself, and then sits up bolt-straight when Harry settles between his parted thighs, legs crossed, demure, and unzips the boy's jeans.

 

"What the fuck, Harry," he hisses. Not angry. More like a sudden exhale.

 

"Inside?" Harry asks, not stopping.

 

The sunlight is so warm on Harry's skin. His hands, and the back of his neck, and his bare feet. There was no fire at his crash, the engine jerked back almost a foot but intact enough to keep subdued. No flames to pattern the rest of his skin the same patchy shade as his right-hand eye. Just the steady dribble of blood from the socket. That too was warm. A liquid kind of warmth. It strange that the sun on the back of his head reminds him of that. Surely he was upright; a focused drip pooling downwards.

 

Eggsy leans back in his chair uneasily. The walls are too high for any peeping tom. Who on earth would get their kicks out of this, anyway. An ageing Lazarus and his boy.

 

Harry slips into it easily. Almost sighs at the familiarity; at knowing how to do something instinctively. Eggsy sucks in a sharp breath as soon as Harry's lips brush his cockhead, and Harry wonders how long it's been for him. Did Eggsy ever bring himself off while Harry was growing scar-tissue in a hospital bed. He wouldn't begrudge the boy.

 

Eggsy grips the arms of the chair so hard his knuckles are white with it, and Harry pulls back once or twice to kiss them. To pull a finger into his mouth and suckle on it a moment. The boy looks down at him, flush-faced and wordless. Lets Harry take it slow. Holds himself back from thrusting. He's very patient. Very careful.

 

A hand at the base of his prick and his tongue slowly lathing the underside of the head, Harry brings him off in a shuddering spit of grunts and starts. "Fuck," Eggsy swears, sounding almost genuinely pained. "Fuck, fuck, Harry, don't—"

 

"It's all right," Harry soothes. "I have you."

 

He feels bold enough to lick the boy clean; his own hand too, where the mess had slid down in a wet trickle.

 

Blood against the back of his head. A gaping chasm of it. It must've made quite a halo. How awful, Harry thinks, for the boy to have witnessed it.

 

He washes his mouth out with beer before he kisses Eggsy. He supposes the youth of today don't care about such things, but he finds the idea a little grim. Leans back and takes a deep slug, and then carefully takes the boy into his arms.

 

"You're alive," Eggsy mutters against his neck, an unsteady mantra. "You're alive, you're fucking—"

 

"I'm certainly getting there," Harry murmurs back.

 

*

 

Harry frowns at the mirror on his living room wall.

 

Another house, a family home, might've had a television hung in the same spot, but he finds he doesn't own one. An eclectic library of politics, world-history and pulp fiction, but apparently a man of his standards doesn't care for soap operas.

 

("You never had time for it," Eggsy shrugs, when the question is raised. He says it like it's a given that Harry was a busy man.)

 

He rubs at the back of his head, over the long scar, and decides he needs a haircut.

 

There's a decent-looking barber a few minutes' walk from the house, an elderly man who sits him in a comfortable chair and says, "Good to see you again, Mr. Hart."

 

 _Terribly sorry,_ Harry apologises, _I'm afraid I can't remember if we've ever met._

 

"I heard about the accident, of course," he carries on, soft-spoken wrapping a towel around the back of Harry's neck. "A shame."

 

A right shame. Like this is a common fucking occurrence.

 

*

 

They are lazily eating beans on toast when Eggsy tells Harry his own life story. Eggsy already in his pyjamas and no shirt, his foot propped up on a spare chair at the dinner table, using his bread to shovel up the beans rather than a fork. Harry tuts at his poor etiquette and that more than anything, strangely, makes the boy beam.

 

There's an impressive pause before he begins.

 

"I was just a kid, y'know," Eggsy says.

 

"And I made you into a man?"

 

"Summat like that, yeah," he sighs.

 

Harry was a tailor, since very early in his life. Not a family succession, but a tradecraft he devoted himself to wholly. He was adopted by a shop-owner called Chester King – Eggsy says the name on half a spit, indelicately, glancing at Harry sidelong as he does. A bastard of a man but he had a head for business, Eggsy says. Harry felt the whole industry staid, though. Inaccessible. Took Eggsy under his wing, saw some promise in him. A way with people that Harry seemed to think mirrored his own knack, Eggsy says wryly.

 

It's fucking ridiculous, Harry thinks, the whole while Eggsy is spinning his tale. How can one jarring moment knock out all that lifetime of learning, all that experience? Surely memories are sturdier than stacks of tin cans at a funfair; and yet so easily tumbled down by a single throw.

 

"I rather ballsed things up," Harry murmurs.

 

"I'm takin' care of it," Eggsy says. His food must be cold but he picks at it anyway. A small smile on his strong face.

 

Harry takes a deep breath and tries to smile back. "You must've rocked the boat somewhat before all this mess, anyway. Sleeping with your boss? Crass, Eggsy, too crass."

 

The boy flushes beautifully, and it turns Harry's smile genuine. He has, by this point, stopped asking for kisses; leans over and takes one. Eggsy always makes an almost-inaudible sound, a low moan, something, Harry thinks, akin to gratitude. He wants to pull the boy apart and find out where that sound comes from.

 

He sits back abruptly, frowning—

 

Three things Harry Hart has noticed, sly on his internal radar, over the past month or so: firstly, that he has excellent hearing.

 

It's a stroke of incredulous luck that he has so little physical damage. The boy had sat close beside him on a stiff hospital chair, pale and horrified, as a doctor showed Harry how to take out his artifical eye, told him how often to clean it; but apart from the obvious, he's in superfluously good shape. Strong legs, tree trunks, a slim enough waist, broad shoulders, no hunch to his back or limp to his step. Even his remaining left eye has a habit of catching little nuances in his periphery. But it's the hearing that surprises him most of all. He can tell the moment the boy falls asleep in his arms at night, clear as a flicking switch when his breathing turns from a conscious act to automatic. He can hear the traffic gathering at the end of the mews, even when the whole bloody selling point of a central London mews is absolute privacy. He can overhear quiet conversations that are none of his business with a detached ease, and no small amount of guilt. He actively has to stop himself.

 

The second revelation is the fact that he feels clumsy as hell with a pair of scissors in his hands – wonders how he'd ever cut paper and chalked up fabric, canvassed and stitched – but the same cannot be said of a knife. He cooks rarely and slowly, but has nicked himself shaving more often than he's gashed himself with a knife over a chopping board. They just settle so easily into the palm of his hand.

 

The third revelation is that he has some violence in him.

 

That's the one that always pulls him up short.

 

He motions for the boy to come over, fully into his lap, and Eggsy gripes about it, but Harry simply parts his thighs and lets Eggsy stand between them. Above him. Eggsy's hands carding through Harry's neat hair, searching his face for some explanation that doesn't exist. Why them? Why now? Why did Harry lose everything that made them who they are?

 

Harry plants a short kiss on Eggsy's bare stomach. The boy jerks back like it tickles, then steels himself for a second.

 

All Harry can think about is how he would never hurt this boy. Not on purpose.

 

*

 

Harry feels the most uncomfortable when he's forced to ask Eggsy personal questions that should be common fucking knowledge. How he takes his tea. Where he grew up. What's his favourite film. How old is he.

 

He is twenty two, and Harry feels a heavy sinking in his stomach, and doesn't follow up by asking how long they've known each other.

 

Another question he indelicately has to ask: _which of them usually—_

 

_In bed, he means—_

 

"Christ, Harry," Eggsy says, unusually curt. "You gotta ask?"

 

They take it slowly nonetheless. Eggsy has a lot of layers to shed, and Harry's more than happy to help; undoes the heavy watch on the boy's wrist, unbuttons his waistcoat, unbuckles the leather belt around his waist. They both have two fingers of strong whiskey in them, had spent the evening reading in comfortable silence after Eggsy came home from work and complained of a day of boredom, too few clients and too much admin. Harry was always better at the paperwork, Eggsy says, though he had a mean streak for manual labour in him too.

 

"It must have been a bloody nightmare when we were both working," Harry grumbles good-naturedly, trying to lighten the mood after his faux pas. "All these fucking buttons."

 

Eggsy huffs out a laugh, shaky and smiling. He's no help at all, slowing Harry down with tender kisses, grabbing at his hands and wrists to kiss those too. Harry hoists him up, surprisingly easy for the boys heft, gets them both on the bed, his knees spread wide across Eggsy's thighs. Pleased, he gets the job done.

 

He doesn't remember Eggsy's body splayed beneath him like this, hard, shallow breaths and an open mouth, but he has no complaints about relearning it. Every sharp curve of the boy's muscle, his cologne-mingled scent, strongest around the neck, his vainly smooth chest; Eggsy lies still and gives Harry the room to find everything out anew with his fingertips, his tongue.

 

What could this boy have ever possibly seen in him. He must have been one hell of a tailor. Harry laughs incredulously to himself, and Eggsy tilts his chin up, questioning.

 

"I don't know what I'd do without you," Harry murmurs, annoyed at his own saccharine sigh. But he doesn't retract it.

 

"You're the one who saved me," Eggsy breathes back, and in a sudden rush, sits up, gathers Harry's face between his hands and studies him, his eyes darting back and forth from Harry's lips to his dead eye to his live one, the only remaining window into his soul. "Are you--fuck, Harry, are you happy? Here, like this? It must be so fucking boring for you, I mean, you had a life, you had a good life, and--"

 

Harry is not a man of any particular honesty. A good quip or a barb serve him just as well as the truth, he's found. But he has no need or desire whatsoever to lie to the boy.

 

"I'm happy with you," he says, hiding his embarrassment with a shrug.

 

"Fuck," Eggsy exhales, low and wounded. Both of them come forward for a kiss at the same time, but it's Harry who deepens it. Loves the swell of the boy's wet bottom lip as he worries it between his tongue and teeth. "I'm happy if you are," he murmurs against Harry's teeth.

 

They take it slow. Eggsy on his stomach with his face buried into the pillow, muffled urges to do it, Harry, c'mon, harder, and Harry simply keeps his pace steady and his thrust slow. Kisses the back of Eggsy's neck religiously, as far down the knots of his spine as Harry can comfortably bend without pulling out. The boy's tight and taut and wails into the pillow when Harry pushes in with a little less control, both of them noisy with it. Harry's sweat drips from his chin and onto the boy's pale back, and the droplets shiver there as Eggsy's muscles tremor and quake.

 

Harry feels just so at home. Buried here inside Eggsy. He could draw this out for hours, for days. He belongs with the boy; absolute, undeniable fact.

 

That niggling violence comes out in him towards the end. Thrusting in deep and hard, no finesse, just an incensed desire to feel as much as he can. It's like his first time, boys fumbling around with each other on ageing dormitory beds, Harry letting a boy two years his senior spit on his fingers and drive them in and feeling oddly completed by it--

 

And the clarity of the memory pushes him over. A deep, grateful groan as he comes, Eggsy swearing and cussing and saying his name underneath him.

 

Harry rests his head between the boy's shoulder blades for a moment. Pulls out ever so slowly, before he's fully soft.

 

"Shift yourself," he says, a little pat on Eggsy's warm rump. Feeling boldly crass. "Let me blow you."

 

The slightest pause, before Eggsy flails his arm back and smacks Harry lightly on the side of the head. It makes him laugh. God, it makes him laugh. "Fuck off, Harry. Jesus. I'm spent. You need to change your fucking sheets."

 

Harry kisses the sweat from his shoulder. He feels like they've come full circle. His catalogue of memories still blank, but at the very least, he and the boy are back to how they might once have been. It warms him. Makes him feel as though, even if he is a man of some secret violence, that he has Eggsy to ground him, to settle him. To make him feel as though his hands are shaped for more beautiful things than knife handles.

 

*

 

Eggsy showers, early in the morning hours, while Harry is half asleep. Long and hot, condensation prickling Harry's bare arms and neck. And when he comes back to bed, his hair damp and his body towelled dry, he settles in against Harry's back. The tip of his nose pressed against Harry's spine, and his eyes, curiously, scrunched tight shut.


	3. Chapter 3

Here is something that dawns on Harry Hart, far more slowly than perhaps it should: he kisses Eggsy goodnight every single time they go to bed. Holds the boy’s tired face in his hands and kisses his fond smile, licks gently into that warm mouth, all weary youth and a taste of something low and rough.  
  
He kisses Eggsy goodnight, every night, but Eggsy never repays the favour on his early mornings.

*

Harry briefly entertains the idea of hunting for a job.  
  
“Who’s looking for a one-eyed, amnesiac quinquagenerian these days?” he asks Eggsy dryly over brunch one morning. He went to Borough market that weekend, brought back paper-bagged coffee with some trite name, and local-made cheese, and overpriced organic fruit. The kettle is just about whistling on the hob behind them, and he feels—easy. Comfortable enough for self-deprication, at least. “I suppose travelling freak-shows are a cultural faux pas now.”  
  
Eggsy grins, scooping kiwi flesh out of its skin with a teaspoon. Harry suspects he could’ve popped down to Tesco and the boy would be none the wiser. Still; his bottom lip is glistening with the juice. “C’mon, Harry. Pimp yourself out.”  
  
Harry settles back in his chair, steepled fingers and pursed lips, and plays along. “Very well. A tailor, apparently. Tradecraft. Rare these days.”  
  
Eggsy nods, lifts a finger to start counting on his hand. “Us disenfranchised youths,” he smirks. _Yoofs_ , he says it.  
  
“Eloquent.” A second finger rises. “Queer. Excellent for the positive discrimination quota,” he insists, when Eggsy flips him the bird. “Well-dressed, to an extent.” Third finger.  
  
He catches a glimpse of the boy’s expression, and it’s not gamely anymore, it’s sad. Terribly sad, for a split-second, as though he has a hundred thousand positives he could list off the top of his head about a version of Harry Hart that doesn’t quite exist anymore. Instead, he keeps his mouth shut, schools his expression, and squeezes his face into a grin.  
  
“Best stick to housekeeping,” Harry conceeds mildly. He feels suddenly like a blind man holding puzzle pieces in each hand. No choice but to feel out the edges and hope for familiarity.  
  
The boy heads off back to work. His lips pressed briefly against Harry’s temple. Barely a kiss at all.

 *

It’s absurdly innocuous, finding the guns.  
  
Harry’s reading through the first chapter of each book in a twenty-high stack, seeing if any of them ring a bell, and waiting for the tuneless ding of the tumble dryer clocking off. The very ideal of a doting house-husband. It’s mostly boxers and socks in there; they own a shocking amount of dry-clean only suits between the two of them.  
  
He’s making space in the drawer for rolls of balled-up socks when he finds it. A thumb-sized hole on the backing paper. He runs his fingers over it, and it feels used, a worn lip. A hidden compartment.  
  
Carefully, Harry pulls the drawer off of its railing, and lays it on the floor. Piles up the underwear neatly beside the bed. An opened box of condoms, and another in reserve, and a bottle of lubricant; those go in the pile as well.  
  
He feels strangely at ease, doing this. A methodical investigation, not a haphazard hunt.  
  
Harry pulls the backing off of the drawer, and places it carefully to one side.  
  
He’s not shocked to see them. Perhaps he grew up outside of the city, an upper-class upbringing with annual shoots and rifles on country house walls.  
  
Or perhaps he’s just a man who’s comfortable around guns.  
  
There are two of them, hooked curtly in this hidden compartment at the back of the drawer. Both thick and blunt, double-barreled but the vague shape of a pistol. A row of shotgun rounds lined up like soldiers along the right-hand side. The guns are clean but clearly well-used; graying around the trigger from fingerprint marks.  
  
He picks one out without a single jot of hesitation. The weight of it feels good in his hand. The complete opposite of how he feels when he’s holding a needle and thread, a tape measure, all the tools of his supposed trade. He can tell it’s loaded, and he can tell that this gun was not made for Eggsy’s hand.  
  
A small engraving on the side. Not dissimilar to the necklace hidden in Eggsy’s shoe.  
  
He hums a little noise of satisfaction, and isn’t sure why. And then he puts the gun back, re-assembles the drawer, and slides it quietly back into place.

*

Later that afternoon, Harry sits at his desk and idly searches newspaper archives for the date of his crash. His office, he notes calmly, is full of strict, discoloured patches on the walls, an older, brighter red paint as though preserved behind some frame or panel for vast stretches of time. Rows and rows of them, there are. Cleaned haphazardly, but not painted over. The difference is very faint. Only someone actively looking would notice.  
  
There are no reports of car crashes, in the local papers or the nationals. Just, two days later, uncountable columns of reports on the aftermath of Valentine’s Day.

 

*

  
  
Eggsy comes home with a little gash on his forehead and a lie on his lips about walking into the coathooks like a fucking grade-A idiot. He sits with his leg jiggling impatiently while Harry dabs the wound with cotton wool. “Nah, don’t bother with a plaster,” he says, batting Harry on the hip, “I’m gonna shower.”  
  
Harry—loves the boy, quite genuinely. Perhaps the only genuine thing in his life now. Eggsy holding his hand, at the hospital; the first memory he has which is clear and crisp, unmuddled by his poor vision and his fragile brain. Everything before then, he has no idea of; and everything after then seems somehow questionable, these days. He wishes he had better justification for loving the boy with his whole soul, and then feels a little like shit that he needs it.  
  
He has a deep-seated fear that the boy will leave him. And then he will be an old man with no memories and nobody to fill to in the blanks. Sad and unsalvageable.  
  
He undresses on his way upstairs, and is naked by the time he gets to the bathroom. Slides the steam-tinted door open and steps in behind Eggsy. He takes his showers almost scalding hot, as though he has some dirt on his skin that won’t be sluiced off without the added heat. “What’s up?” Eggsy murmurs, not quite turning round.  
  
Harry reaches around him for soap, lathers up his hands. Massages in long strokes down Eggsy's back - _were you ever a gymnast_ , Harry had once murmured, fingers playing over those muscles in bed, and Eggsy just replied, _how the fuck did you know that?_ Harry guesses often and guesses well. Eggsy is surprisingly pliable, his arms come up nice and easy for Harry to wash under and around, and he spreads his legs dutifully when Harry nudges them apart with his toes. Soaps up, scrubs down.  
  
He waits until the water runs clean over Eggsy's fraught body. There are nicks and pale scars all over the boy, knife fights from his dangerous days, burn marks from teenage self-destruction. Harry puts his fingers to a few of them. He has mirroring marks on his own skin that he rarely notices. As though they've been there from birth.  
  
Harry let's his hand slide south. Presses the pad of his blunt thumb to the top of Eggsy's arse; drags it down. A hard, steady push where the boy just opens up.  
  
"Jesus, Harry," he breathes. Braces his hands against the shower wall.  
  
"You know," Harry mutters, bending his thumb so just the tip sinks in. Not even up to the first knuckle. Just his clipped nail. "I think daily about how terribly fucked I am over you, Eggsy."  
  
Harry gets to his knees, water tapping on his back and pooling a little at his feet. Eggsy's back is reddish from the heat of the water, but his thighs are pale, his muscles coiled and taut inside.  
  
"I really--" Harry tries. He hasn't quite the muster, and spreads the boy wide, a little rough, kissing against him. Ridiculous, that he should say all this down here, like this. "I really love you quite devastatingly," he says, and whether Eggsy hears him or not, whether the words are lost in the steam and hiss of the shower, the hisses of the boy himself as he bites down on his forearm; at least it has been said. The truth of it out in the world.  
  
He rims the boy until he's near crying. The deep thrust of his tongue and fingers, long lingering minutes while the water turns lukewarm, and Eggsy is panting obscenities against his own skin at every lurid drive. He's almost unyielding, statuesque, and Harry loves the tremble in his calves for the effort of standing up.  
  
He gets a hand through Eggsy's legs, up, up, feels out the heavy hang of his cock and curls his palm around it. Eggsy grabs onto him like a falling man clutches at air. No slow build; the boy makes Harry squeeze and jerk him at a vicious pace, his left leg spasming intermittently and his curses like poetry, loud and primal.  
  
He comes, sordid, against the white tile. Harry kisses all the way down his leg. Right down to the ankle, almost prostrate. You saved my life. Let me thank you properly.  
  
He's murmuring a soft refrain, and Harry stands up to hear it. "Don't touch me," Eggsy is hissing. "I'll die, I'll fucking die--"  
  
Harry is less good at obeying orders than the boy is. Keeps his hands close against Eggsy's hips. "You won't die. I have you. I'm here."  
  
"You're alive," Eggsy gasps out. Every time they fuck. That clutching reminder. "I'm gonna blow you," he says, shakily determined. Somewhat of a non-sequitur.  
  
"The hot water's all gone," Harry says mildly, like the boy didn't just offer to suck him off. "In bed. Come on."  
  
They spread a few towels out over the duvet and Harry lies back, his hair soaking into the flannel. Eggsy slides up beside him first of all, clutching Harry's face in his hands. Again, his constant mantra, you're alive.  
  
(They had discussed, briefly, the events of Valentine's Day. Harry was surprisingly secure in Intensive Care, most phones in lockers rather than pockets. Scuffles in the waiting rooms but not a bloodbath. "I thought I was gonna get to the ward and find you stabbed through with a fucking scalpel," Eggsy had said bitterly. "Right after--right after everything you been through."  
  
Eggsy is not forthcoming with his own experience of V-Day, and Harry doesn't ask. Men became murderers that day, so he's heard. No reason boys wouldn't too.)  
  
He spends ever such a long time suckling the head of Harry's cock. His cropped hair dripping cool water on Harry's pelvis and thighs. When he does slide down, it's with his tongue, the side of his mouth, nothing engulfing. Like Harry's made of fucking glass. The boy has more verve than that, and Harry knows it, and doesn't want to be patronised by Eggsy's sudden propriety.  
  
Some—there is—  
  
—some violence in whatever man Harry Hart has become—  
  
So he cards his fingers wide through Eggsy's hair and holds the base of his own prick and feeds it to the boy. Soft encouragement, a steady grip. Down until Eggsy's nose brushes his skin, his arms shaking with the effort of it. Harry holds him there. He's an absolute miracle. This boy who held his hand and breathed life back into him. Coloured in the empty lines left after his crash.  
  
Harry feels safe and warm and swallowed. No responsibility. No need for worry. Just focus on the humid cavern of the boy's throat.  
  
Eggsy chokes a little, his fingers twitching.

 

"Easy, easy," Harry soothes. He thrusts up just once, to try, but no, that choking retch again, and he has to let Eggsy up. Keeps his hands to himself all the rest of the while. Eggsy's pace incensed and brutal, no fear of breaking glass now.  

 

It's only much later, when Eggsy has wiped the come from the corner of his mouth and cleaned his teeth and curled up to sleep with his back pressed against Harry's, that Harry feels fucking miserable about it all. His hands were too rough, his body too selfish. As though he's a man who can so easily lose control.

 

The little moue of gratitude Eggsy made, when Harry groaned low and spurted thickly his mouth, had sounded so much like disgust. Not thankful at all. Why on earth would he think such a thing.

*

  
He buys flowers. It's a trite gesture and he knows it, but Eggsy might get a laugh out of the absurd romance of it. A little bouquet, yellow, black and white: calla lilies, pansies, a silly-looking sunflower or two. Bright and bold, like the boy himself. He puts on a suit instead of a cardigan, a pair of thick-rimmed sunglasses, and takes a cab to Savile Row.

 

The air feels heavier than it has any right to, and Harry Hart walks slowly up to the smooth railings and clean glass of Kingsman tailors. He pauses, just for a moment, on the pavement outside the shop, takes in the three suited mannequins standing to attention, headless and cold, the country-house interior, the gold lettering on the window and engraved plaque at the door. Tries to use his oddly heightened senses to feel—something, as though he could inhale a lifetime of memories along with the gritty London air.

 

He smells blood. So strongly he expects to look down and see a broken corpse at his feet.

 

Why would—he know what that looks like—

 

What use are rhetorical questions to a man who can’t even answer plain ones.

 

He expects to see an old boy attending the shop, but it’s a pale and pretty young woman, bespoke pinstripe from head to toe, her mousy hair pulled back in a tight, neat ponytail. Emotions flicker across her face like a zoetrope as she glances up at him, and quickly settle into a warm, wide smile. She is quite stunning.

 

“Harry,” she says, a comfortable sigh. Respectful, too, like she’s addressing him with a title rather than his plain old name.

 

“You must be Roxanne,” he says, offering a hand. “I’ve heard tale.”

 

“Roxy, please. It’s so wonderful to see you up and about,” she says, clasping him gratefully. “We were all so worried. A terrible shame.”

_A terrible shame._ His life-or-death car crash. A terrible fucking shame.

 

“I rather expected some doddering butler to greet me,” Harry says, a smooth subject change surprisingly easy. “Forgive my snobbery but it’s rather progressive to see a girl like you in a place like this.”

  
She looks flushed and proud. Old money – he can tell from the lack of self-deprecation in her pride – but she earned this job. She worked hard, he’s sure, to prove herself in this boy’s only club.

 

“You must be here for Eggsy,” she says, that same wordsmith skill. “He’s stepped out for a while and I’m afraid I’ve no ETA on when he’ll be back. Too many clients too lazy to come into the shop, though it’s uncouth of me to say, of course. He’s out for a fitting.”

 

She is charming. Harry wonders sadly if Eggsy ever slept with her while he was in hospital. Whether he lost the boy to her, however briefly, when he had no chance of fighting back.

 

A jealous old sod with a vicious streak.

 

She finds a vase for his flowers, pours him a glass of good bourbon and they sit cross-legged on the Edwardian furniture, chatting mildly. She has her own stories of how she met Harry Hart, what a wonderful eye for a perfect suit he had, all his training and knowledge, imparted to the new generation, herself and Eggsy, before his untimely accident. She speaks without any unnatural pauses, a practiced flow, but everything she says sounds like a sales pitch.

 

The shop feels small and cosy and like there is a great chasm underneath, ready to swallow Harry up the second he tells an unintended lie.

 

Eggsy comes in abruptly from a back door that looks like a dressing room, with a mobile pressed to his ear. Roxy stands, not too much haste but she’s up quick, her hand hovering slightly away from her body like a warning sign. “Orders up, Rox,” Eggsy is saying, “We’ve got word from—”

 

He stops when he sees Harry. His eyes go wild, darting all around the shop and over Harry like he’s painting a portrait of the man, here, right now, in this scene, this suit, this space. He works up a smile that easily reaches his eyes, sparkling, and says, “Fuck me, mate. Feel good to be home?”

 

“I’ll get back to you on that,” Harry replies, and Eggsy’s smile falters, a fraction. “No miracle flood of memories, I’m afraid.”

 

“Ain’t that kind of movie,” Eggsy murmurs. He hands his phone over to Roxy and she pockets it carefully in the breast of her jacket. They’re playing out some tableau that Harry can’t decipher, and he’s tired, early in the day but tired. The shop has drained all the energy out of him.

 

He wants to take Eggsy home, take him to bed, hole him up in the world they’re building for themselves in the aftermath of Harry’s crash. Where nobody can ask him to remember false feelings or figure out the extent of the truth in every sentence he’s told. Where he can scrub out whatever remained of Harry Hart before and start afresh.

 

Where there are hidden guns and symbolic necklaces stuffed into shoes.

 

Harry takes a few steps forward and kisses Eggsy. Not obscenely, of course, but not particularly chaste either. The gentle press of his tongue against Eggsy’s top lip, his fingers light on Eggsy’s cheek, leaving a few flecks of yellow pollen. “Can you take the afternoon off?” Harry says, low and wanting.

 

“Harry, what the fuck are you doing,” Eggsy replies, absolutely steady. His hands at his side, not touching Harry, balled into fists.

 

The girl, Roxanne, is looking between the two of them with wide, awful eyes. Looking at Harry like he should know so much better. Looking at Eggsy like he’s a fucking traitor.

*

 

They argue that night, like untrained dogs. Harry’s exhausted, slumped in an armchair with his hand cradling his temple while the boy paces, jittery and shouting.

 

“You fucking said it, Harry,” Eggsy bites, “Slept with my boss, didn’t I? You can’t just go—pulling shit like that in front of—”

 

“You always seemed so bloody open about it,” Harry interrupts, his voice bitter and loud. They had held hands in the fucking park. _You wanna kiss me?_ Jesus fucking Christ.

 

“Not in front of people we know, Harry! Not people we fucking work with!”

 

“I’m retired,” Harry says, coldly. “As you so often like to remind me. I didn’t know the girl.”

 

“Yeah, there’s a list of crap a mile long you don’t know, ain‘t there,” Eggsy spits. His accent gets appalling when he’s angry. So many years between them, and so many experiences.

 

“I am not dim, Eggsy,” Harry sighs. Two guns upstairs that fit the shape of his fingers. “I know you’re keeping secrets from me.”

 

That pulls the boy up short. Stops his pacing. He gets up in Harry’s lap, not an embrace but a threat, his teeth bared and his finger pointed in warning. “Don’t,” he hisses. “Don’t. You don’t know shit.”

 

Harry, bitterly, supposes he does not.

*

 

Harry sleeps on the sofa that night, and at 3.32am, they come for him. A thick gloved hand clamped around his mouth. Swallowed up by such a deep and familiar darkness.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder that this fic has hella consent issues.

**iv.**

 

The room is not made for torture. White walls, clean, a central table with two chairs, a thin but fresh mattress on a cot in the corner. No flickering strip lights. Harry is free to pace as he pleases. Despite the placating nature of the room, a normal man would panic. A normal man would bang on the pristine walls and demand to speak to someone, demand a phone call, demand justice.

 

Harry feels the rote calm of a man who has been in similar situations before. Not déjà vu, just knowledge and experience enough to quell any surface anxiety. He is dressed in his pyjama bottoms and the hair on his chest, and there is a pair of trousers and a crisp navy shirt folded on the cot. Nobody presumed to dress him, so he changes himself. The clothes are to his exact measurements.

 

He rubs his hands over his face, devastatingly tired.

 

His eye has been removed. Disrespectful. He carefully draws his forefinger over the sagging bottom lid, numb with scar tissue. Eggsy had put his hands on those scars a dozen times and it had never much phased him. Had even put two fingers on the eye itself one time and rolled it around like a plaything; snorted a laugh at how sarcastic it made Harry look. He didn't mind a jot. Swallowed up the boy's laugh with his lips, wanted him warm and smiling always. They enquired a lot about one another's happiness, in the earlier days.

 

How early were those days? They had been together for--some time before the crash--

 

A fucking tree didn't do this to him. Nature isn't so careful, so smooth and unjagged.

 

Harry Hart mutters to whatever placeholder man he has become: "You fucking fool."

 

They send in the girl first. She sits curtly at the table with a clipboard in her hands and an unhappy air about her. Just as polite and respectful as she was in the shop, but she's allowing less of herself to bleed through this particular act, reading almost directly from the clipboard.

 

"My name is Roxy Morton," she says, not looking at him. "Codename: Lancelot. You are in the holding quarters of the Kingsman agency, in Hertfordshire, England. Your name is Harry Hart, and always has been. You are also called Galahad." She looks up at him, briefly, and seems so terribly sad. He wishes he knew how he's wronged her.

 

"I'm using specific phrases and triggers," she says, "in an attempt to induce mental recognition in you. This conversation is being recorded."

 

She tells him steadily that this isn't an interrogation. They aren't here to break him. They just want to ask some questions.

 

Harry still has no real idea who _they_ is.

 

There are a lot of questions he can't answer, and he thinks dryly, how unsurprising. How utterly consistent his life has been until this point: a vast blank chasm behind him, a gaping unknown to the fore, and Eggsy by his side.

 

He's had a dull undercurrent of pain this entire time that he has no idea where Eggsy is.

 

What does Harry know, she asks. What does he remember. Does he remember Kingsman, who they are and what they do. Does he know the significance of the date 1849, of black umbrellas, of the phrase _Oxfords, not brogues._

 

Does he remember that he is a murderer.

 

"I found a gun," Harry murmurs, so tired. "It felt good in my hand."

 

She notes this down.

 

"It was agreed by committee," she says carefully, as though she has suddenly gone off-script and isn't sure if that will be condoned, "That you would—you wouldn't want—to remember what you did."

 

"How very damning."

 

"You were a good man, Harry," she tries, her veneer of impartiality cracking just a touch. And then she takes a short breath and carries on with her questions.

 

Has he been contacted by any outside agencies. Any hostile forces.

 

Harry barks out a laugh. "How the fuck should I know?" he says, and then feels a little bad about his rudeness. She tells him they took his eye for testing, in case he was intercepted without knowledge. To check for any tampering.

 

Her last question: has Gary Unwin ever suggested to him that he is anything more than a retired tailor?

 

"No," Harry bites. "No, he played his part excellently. I bloody well have my suspicions now, though."

 

Roxy thanks him for his time and her voice echoes with regret.

 

"Where's Eggsy?" Harry asks finally, bitter that he can't keep an edge of panic out of his voice. "Do you have him?"

 

"He's fine," she says, her back already turned to Harry. "You—it's better if you don't see him."

 

They make him wait, perhaps an hour or two. He doesn't have a watch and his wrist feels oddly bare without one. He wonders whether Eggsy is fine in the sense that he is unhurt, or fine in the sense that he is an integral part of this terrible machine. Neither option holds any particular optimism.

 

A man comes to see him next, tall and military, clipped Scottish and a stern bedside manner. He holds Harry's left arm straight out on the table, crooked at the elbow, and takes a vial of blood from him. The pinprick doesn't even make him flinch; like he's had far worse. Something about the way the man touches him, prim and casual, makes Harry feel like they've known each other for some time.

 

For his part, he has only that vague sense of recognition one gets seeing someone from the pictures on any London street. As though the context is all wrong.

 

"Merlin," he says, noting Harry's expression. "That's how you would have known me, at least. Arthur, now," he says, with no small amount of distaste.

 

"I'd guess by your rather twee naming conventions that places you high up in the food chain," Harry says. No real pretence of niceties now. Not if he knows this man.

 

"Yes, and once upon a time you'd have mocked me pretty damn heartily for it. Called me a snob or some such."

 

"I'm sure you'd have deserved it," Harry says lightly, and it makes the man smile. A wry, quick smile that's ever so quickly quashed.

 

He shakes the vial of Harry's blood and jots a label on it. The serum, he explains off-handedly, was handled by his own R&D department some years back. Psychogenic amnesia; they've never had an opportunity to follow up its exact effects. "May as well, while we have you," he shrugs.

 

And then he tells Harry a story about a man named Lee Unwin, who saved Harry's life.

 

"Eggsy saved your life too," Merlin says, suddenly wholly cold. "After Kentucky—"

 

"Treat me like an idiot," Harry interrupts coarsely.

 

"—Very well. You murdered eighty two people in a church in Kentucky." _Jesus there was so much blood, pooling around his head, yes, but on his hands too, how did it get on his hands—_ "You were under the influence of a neurological inhibitor at the time, but Kingsman deemed you too compromised to return to active duty. Even if you were physically able."

 

He waves his hand vaguely around his right eye, nodding to indicate he means Harry's. "You were shot."

 

"Ah," Harry mutters, very quietly.

 

Eggsy had sold him the car crash story so diligently. A first class young actor.

 

"The boy argued himself sick to let us appoint him your guardian." There's an insinuation here, Harry thinks, that some among the agency would have felt it easier to just put him out of his fucking misery. "The bullet's trajectory had an 86% probability of causing permanent brain damage," Merlin carries on, "But we had to be sure. People don't retire from Kingsman. They are—absolved."

 

"Even if the sins are so great?" Harry murmurs.

 

"You've done a fine fucking job of making it worse for yourself," Merlin snaps. "Eggsy was your bloody ward, Harry. After all you did to him, he's out there now, shouting down a room full of his rank and file superiors to let you walk out of here again. A second chance, he says. He's half your fucking age, Harry."

 

"The boy is perfectly capable of making informed decisions," Harry says angrily. He has his hands in his lap, and they're shaking slightly. "Clearly he didn't want his rank and file superiors to know—"

 

"There's nothing to know," Merlin says, loud and cutting and final. "You were practically his father, Harry. You certainly never fucked the boy."

 

There's a warmth to white lies, even when one suspects the duality of them. The truth has a palpable coldness to it.

 

Another empty wait. He had made love to the boy at least a dozen times, even more with his hands and his mouth. They were always quite safe and never entirely slow. Eggsy was always tired from work to go more than once of an evening.

 

Too tired—

 

There were times he'd worked very late and just wanted to sleep. So he said. He kissed Harry's hands as they roamed, grabbing them up from the peachy swell of his arse, back to his mouth. _I'm fucking beat,_ he'd say, and he'd breathe out shakily when Harry murmured: _of course, of course._

Eggsy, likely through his own pigheadedness, is finally allowed to see Harry, and the first thing he does is take Harry's face in his hands and kisses him. Harry can't help himself from grabbing the boy's waist, two fingers slipping into his belthooks out of habit to pull him close. He kisses back before he can think better of it.

 

"I don't know what they told you," Eggsy whispers, fierce as a flame, "But it don't mean shit, Harry, means less than nothing, okay? Okay?" He kisses Harry with his tongue, the same way Harry always kissed him on languid weekend mornings, no engagements and no hurry to join the waking world. All tongue, lips barely even touching at all; just wet warm muscle sliding over Harry's bottom lip and into his mouth and across his teeth and along his tongue.

 

"Are you trying to convince me," Harry asks, "Or trying to convince yourself?"

 

"I'm multi-tasking," Eggsy says miserably. "I love you. Fuck, Harry. I love you."

 

"But you're not in love with me," Harry says. He would phrase it as a question, but there's no point. His breath rattles when he draws it in, and his hands are still at Eggsy's hips. Slowly, he untangles his fingers and puts his hands palm down on his thighs. He pulls his head back; has to jerk it a little to free himself from Eggsy's touch.

 

"Jesus Christ, Eggsy," he whispers, utterly defeated. "You let me violate you."

 

"You wanted it, though," Eggsy says, as though it's justification. It's the first time Harry's felt physically sick throughout this whole quagmire. He still can't remember anything clearly except Eggsy. Eggsy, who clutched his hand at the bedside. Eggsy, who was never his son and laughed at the thought. Eggsy, who was beautiful and bright and now has been broken.

 

Harry's complete fucking selfishness in assuming the boy couldn't be anything but his.

 

"You made a monster of me," he says, very softly.

 

Eggsy balls his fist and just manages not to slam it on the tabletop. "I made you _fucking happy_ , Harry."

 

"At what cost?"

 

Eggsy laughs. Through all this, he laughs, an arid thing that has no humour in it. "I've always been poor," he shrugs bitterly.

 

They sit in silence. They'd always had such an easily silence, before. Tangled up in each other on the sofa after dinner, in front of the fireplace, the dog snoring softly on the empty armchair. The picture of fucking domesticity. As if it had been scripted.

 

Harry rubs the bridge of his nose. If he was tired before, he feels exhausted now, drained of life and love both. "They told me I'm a killer," he says, still quiet.

 

"We're all fucking killers," Eggsy says, as though that makes it better. He hasn't moved to take the other chair, still standing in front of Harry. Radiating heat and anger.

 

"There's a pair of guns in a hidden compartment in my drawer," Harry says, and for the briefest moment, Eggsy looks filled to the brim with hope. As though in that moment, Harry has remembered everything, remembered himself, a wet wash suddenly flooded with colour. "I stumbled across them by accident," he clarifies. "You may wish to remove them if we're going to try this dance again."

 

Eggsy hated every second of Harry's hands upon him, Harry thinks dully. God. Every damn second of it.

 

"I'll do better," Eggsy says. "I can do better, Harry." That determination to make himself believe what he's saying.

 

"Don't you fucking come near me," Harry tells him.

 

And then he says nothing more, and waits for Eggsy to leave. Breathes out, ragged and hurt, when the boy finally goes.

 

*

 

Another man he doesn't know takes Harry to a different white room, with a comfortable chair for him to sit in and an IV drip that's plugged into the back of his hand.

 

There is a mirror in the room, all across one stark wall. Harry supposes the boy is watching him from behind it. But he can't imagine at all the boy's expression. Only his own, staring back at him—

 

Hazy and lopsided—

 

*

 

There is a young boy with a brilliant grin and wet eyes holding his hand as he wakes up. He doesn't know his own fucking name, but he knows that.

 

*

 

There is something quite pleasant about the boredom of middle-aged routine.

 

Harry Hart tells himself.

 

**ad infinitum.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many thanks again to Destronomics for sharing 1000+ emails with me about how miserable we could possibly make these characters.


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